The Hidden Costs of Do-It-Yourself Sales Training for Bankers

by SchneiderSales | May 11, 2020

What bank or credit union CEO doesn’t think about cutting their training budget in the middle of an industry crisis that impacts earnings in a big way?

With big potential gains in market share at stake as we move into the upswing after the current crisis, sales training is the one category of training you can’t afford to cut. The opportunity cost in lost loans and deposits is just too great.

So what, then? Do it yourself to save money? History has shown that doing it yourself can be a lot more costly than you might think.

Every dollar you spend in human capital to create your own sales training can actually accelerate the weakening of your sales culture if the time invested doesn’t increase sales or, even worse, results in product pushing and sales discomfort that can damage a salesperson for life.

Today most organizations have professional trainers who are highly skilled at program development and classroom presentation. Yet how many of these trainers have practical sales experience, have the time to study industry best practices in selling, or can engage your top performing sellers in the classroom? Very few.

In our more than 45 years of sales consulting for banks and credit unions our team has seen fewer than a dozen Internally developed sales training programs that weren’t overly simplistic rip-offs of a prior employers’ program or product training disguised as sales training.

Sales training is simple, but it isn’t easy if you haven’t first developed a preferred way of selling for each selling role around which to train. Only an outside group with years of industry sales experience can give you this, and without it, you risk emphasizing the wrong behaviors. reinforcing negative stereotypes about selling that detract from its true purpose of helping others and not moving the sales production numbers.

Add together the months of multiple salaries invested in program development, the opportunity cost in lost sales over several years if your program doesn’t actually increase sales, and the potential cost of regaining lost credibility for your sales culture if your program isn’t well-received by your best performing bankers. That’s the real cost of do it yourself sales training.

You only get one opportunity to do sales right when conditions are suddenly optimal for achieving big gains in market share. In the end, you’re not really saving money with do it yourself sales training if you’re not making money through better selling.

How to Prepare Your Bankers for Post-Virus Selling

by SchneiderSales | Mar 30, 2020

What We Learned From the 2009 Financial Crisis 

What’s next for bank and credit union selling after the world has seemingly turned upside down overnight?

Right now your employees and your customers are focused totally on their health, on their personal financial survival, and on the survival of their businesses, as they should be.

In the midst of this disruption, smart marketers are laying the foundation for big gains in market share based on lessons learned from the last industry crisis in 2009. During the upswing following the last crisis some organizations made huge gains in growth at the expense of others. They were the companies whose employees were ready to sell.

The opportunity to achieve a fast ROI on your sales efforts will be enormous as customers rethink their finances and banking relationships, reflect on their losses, and consider the new opportunities open to them.

The word fast is key because the recovery is likely to be larger and faster than last time, and the big winners last time were the companies that got the jump on others by using the down period to improve their processes and their sales efforts.

As the nation’s longest operating sales practice for banks and credit unions we’ve seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t work in refocusing and reenergizing a sales team after a crisis. The principles are simple, but successful execution of these principles requires a narrow focus on your best opportunities and a wholistic, integrated approach to sales.

Here’s what we recommend based on what we’ve learned from prior crises:

1. Create a compelling mission to refocus your employees on sales quickly after the crisis.

Begin now to communicate to your employees the importance of your post-crisis mission to help families and businesses get back on their feet. Continually position selling as helping and set big goals for how many customers and prospects you want to help over the second half of the year.

2. Adjust scorecards, goals and sales incentives during the crisis, and again after the crisis, so you don’t  lose employee trust and motivation.

When goals are viewed as either unachievable or too easy to accomplish you‘re less likely to motivate employees to give discretionary effort, and you can’t easily hold employees accountable for their performance.

When conditions are changing dramatically, it’s especially important to rely on a balanced scorecard of performance Including behavioral metrics rather than rely solely on sales volume metrics.

3. Use new customer behavior adopted during the crisis such as social distancing to your advantage.

We’re already working with clients to develop strategies for selling more effectively through the drive-up window, the contact center, videoconferencing and online account opening and lending.

4. Use the chaos in the job market to hire bankers who can sell for key positions based on their strengths for specific selling roles.

There will be thousands of people newly available to you, including current employees who are underutilized, who have top producer sales potential based on their behavioral competencies for a specific selling role regardless of their experience. This is especially critical for job roles that are becoming more sales focused such as contact center reps, universal banker and front line supervision.

Upgrade your team by asking line sales leaders to recruit aggressively now when you don’t need staff and by pre-qualifying candidates quickly with role-specific online behavioral testing rather than non-predictive personality tests.

5. Avoid the herd mentality post-crisis rush to e-learning for sales training and instead focus on classroom or small group remote learning featuring disciplined practice and follow-up skill mastery certification.

E-learning is great for learning facts and procedures and for skill reinforcement. However, research has proven that you don’t learn social skills and conversation behaviors like selling without interacting with real people through disciplined practice and getting feedback on the subtleties of those interactions.

Training is really about making people the same in some important way. If you don’t use this time to define clearly your Preferred Way of Selling for each job role, any sales training you do will be a waste of money.

6. Provide existing customers with more attention and easier access to skilled advisors at a time when your customers will be seeking comfort and advice.

This may require you to convert more service staff to universal bankers and create relationship officers to manage high value relationships.

7. Invest in CRM technology that your sales team will actually use and teach your team how to sell with CRM.

The shortest distance between failure and success in selling in a rebound is a straight line to the prospects most likely to buy. CRM can assure that your resources are applied immediately to your best opportunities. Yet very few frontline bankers know how to use their CRM tools effectively in selling, and poorly designed systems providing too many features and screens often make sales conversations with customers overly time consuming and awkward.

8. Use this time to prepare senior sales leaders to provide focus and accountability for selling and to model behaviorally specific coaching for branch and department sales leaders.

Nothing restarts the sales engine faster than senior sales leaders making sales a priority. Similarly, the best way to get frontline managers coaching is to get senior sales leaders coaching.

9. Lay out a game plan for commercial lending and business development teams to rebuild your sales pipeline with blitz call campaigns to target customers and prospects.

You only have one chance to be first to help a business solve a problem. Every call should be made to achieve a specific next step customer action to move the relationship forward, even if the call is a videoconference to influencers who are working remotely at home.

Start Now So You Hit the Upswing at Full Speed

None of these recommendations require rocket science, but they are all based on science and on the lessons of recent history. None will have the desired impact if you start late.

The secret sauce of sales and marketing has always been to narrow your focus to your best opportunities and to strike fast so you dominate the moment or your target market. That’s what has worked for the winners in the upswing that has followed every major crisis.

With so many people in banks and credit unions working remotely or working on the frontline in the midst of chaos, nothing overcomes their fear or offers more hope than the promise of participating in a big mission to help others in need.

Your job is to define that mission and to sell it in time to capture your opportunity.

Does Sales Culture Help or Hurt Customer Satisfaction?

by SchneiderSales | Dec 10, 2019

If you work in a bank or a credit union you’ve almost certainly heard the concern, “If we commit to creating a stronger sales culture, we’ll lose the relationships and service mindset we’ve worked so hard to build.”

Everyone is familiar with the goal driven, product pushing sales climate that Wells Fargo built, and its disastrous impact on customer loyalty and shareholder value. This and other similar stories are almost always the result of unreasonable performance pressure and greed, not sales culture.

Most experts agree that culture is a key driver of performance. Companies like Chase, Nordstrom, IBM and Apple are high performing sales cultures, yet they’re also market leaders in customer satisfaction? How is that possible?

Most people wrongly associate sales culture with a numbers culture in which performance is defined by short term sales volume and sales activity levels with little regard for customer satisfaction. At the other extreme, sales culture is often compared unfavorably to service culture which is more of a quality assurance or problem avoidance approach to customer experience and customer satisfaction.

In reality, the sales culture modeled by high performing sales organizations is a system of values, beliefs and behaviors focused almost entirely on customer satisfaction and long term profitability. Sales at the expense of customer satisfaction are strongly discouraged simply because they are counterproductive to the mission.

Sales organizations with high employee engagement and high customer satisfaction tend to have higher market share and higher profitability than their competitors. Deloitte found that customer-centric organizations are actually 60 percent more profitable than other companies.

The Case for Sales Culture

I believe strongly that sales culture helps promote customer satisfaction.

In the past 45 plus years, we’ve conducted hundreds of in-depth sales practice assessments and sales climate surveys for some of the best sales organizations in banking like BBVA Compass, Marshall & Ilsley Banks and AmericaFirst Credit Union. I’ve repeatedly found that the better an organization’s sales performance, the more sales is viewed as a step UP from service.

In the numbers cultures I’ve studied, the emphasis on selling anything to meet goals always ends with customers being oversold with products that they don’t need or that aren’t profitable, and with employees product pushing to keep their jobs and experiencing dysfunctional sales discomfort as a result.

In service cultures like those often associated with credit unions, the all-out effort to please members with courtesy, making small talk and working fast to hit efficiency targets all too frequently falls short of actually helping members.

By not encouraging in-depth conversation about emerging needs, explaining the benefits of new products and new technology, or following up initial conversations with onboarding calls and other ways to help, members are ultimately underserved.

Measuring customer experience in terms of just speed, courtesy and absence of problems is misleading. Customer experience also has to be measured in terms of listening, probing, and advising customers on unmet or unaware needs.

According to the University of Michigan-run American Customer Satisfaction Index, banks actually surpassed credit unions in customer satisfaction ratings in 2019 despite the preponderance of service cultures among credit unions.

Are you Building a Sales Culture?

How do you know if you’re on your way to building a customer-focused sales culture or instead to a numbers culture or a service culture? Ask yourself these twelve culture-revealing questions.

1. Are your performance metrics balanced? In a numbers culture, the key metrics are always sales volume and sales activities. In a service culture the key metrics are usually net promoter score and service efficiency scores like wait times. In a true sales culture, the key metrics are a balanced combination of sales results, profitability, customer experience and use of preferred behavior.

2. Are your goals negotiated? In a numbers or service culture, goals are typically assigned. In a sales culture, goals are negotiated based on opportunity and aptitude, usually in combination with a tactical plan that forces a realistic approach to goal setting.

3. Are you hiring for EQ skills and fit with the job role? In a numbers culture, customer facing staff are often hired for their competitiveness and drive while the emphasis in service cultures is usually on sociability and operations experience. In a sales culture employees are hired based on their EQ skills and on their fit with the competencies required for each unique selling role for which commonly used pop personality tests like Predictive Index aren’t predictive of success.

4. Have you defined a Preferred Way of Selling®? In a numbers culture, there is very little concern for how sales are made in contrast to service cultures where there is a lot of emphasis on following a prescribed service routine that enhances speed of delivery and minimizes potential problems.

We’ve registered the phrase Preferred Way of Selling® for sales cultures because every great sales organization has studied and codified its own set of best practice behaviors that work for the company and for each selling role, including how to establish its offerings as clearly different.

5. Is your sales training focused on discovering and selling to the customer’s viewpoint? One of the most startling findings we’ve made in our four decades plus of sales training is that most sales advisors talk 70 percent of the time during a sales conversation compared to the ideal of 30 percent. In a numbers sales culture, this is typically the result of sales training that encourages product dumping. In the case of service cultures talking too much is symptomatic of excessive socializing and
reluctance to ask for next step advances.

In a true sales culture, sales training focuses on conversation skills with a lot of disciplined practice around seeking information that can be used to help the customer. Even the language used in sales training in sales cultures is different with the word helping frequently associated with both selling and coaching.

6. Is your coaching based on observation and on giving specific behavioral feedback? In our corporate assessments, we see a lot of evidence that coaching is occurring, but it seems to vary greatly by culture. In a numbers culture coaching amounts to “get your numbers up” with almost no “how to’s.” In a service culture coaching is frequently limited to transactional quick coaching around service standards with little strategic direction.

In sales cultures, managers are typically asked to give both behavioral feedback and broader direction on strategy.

7. Is your technology customer-centric? In a numbers culture, CRM and operating platforms typically provide structured sales pitches based on prompts generated by customer profiles often leading to sales by “immaculate conception” with little thinking
by the sales advisor. In a service culture technology is used primarily for improving
transaction efficiency.

In sales cultures technology is designed to assist sales advisors in conversational selling and in prioritizing sales and service contacts.

8. Are people recognized and compensated for doing the right things? In a numbers culture, recognition and compensation is driven entirely by achieving your individual numerical goals. In service cultures, individual accountability is often diluted by team based recognition and compensation formulas. The best sales cultures reward both behavior and goal achievement.

9. Do sales and marketing report to the same person? In both numbers cultures and service cultures, sales and marketing typically operate from separate silos with only minimal coordination between them. In sales cultures sales and marketing frequently report through a chief revenue officer who can maintain an integrated customer focus across both functions.

10. Are senior executives rewarded for developing their managers? In a numbers culture or a service culture, senior executives tend to be rewarded entirely for achieving their numerical goals whether those goals are for sales production or for customer satisfaction and efficiency.

In sales cultures, senior executives are often rewarded almost entirely for the percentage of their employees who meet goal and the percentage who meet personal development standards such as certifications of skill mastery. Since managers are the key leverage point for improvement, senior executives are given incentive to coach up every manager so they can’t rely on a few top producers to hit their goals.

11. Is the market feedback you rely on based on actual customer perception and is it specific with regard to employee behavior? In a numbers culture or a service culture, market feedback is typically limited to satisfaction surveys, net promoter scores and shopper surveys which are organized around preset perceptions of the factors customers think are important.

In sales cultures customer feedback processes like focus groups and our AdvisorScore survey are used to give unstructured customer feedback and specific behavioral feedback that can be used in providing specific coaching direction to employees.

12. Are job roles organized around customer relationship needs? In a numbers culture or service culture job roles tend to be structured for efficiencies such as maximizing the number of customers seen per banker per day. In sales cultures job roles tend to be organized to facilitate seamless one-stop interactions for customers.

Selling Your Employees on Sales Culture

Obviously, there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to executing well on sales culture. The strategic integration of these moving parts around the customer’s viewpoint is what makes sales culture so helpful to increasing customer satisfaction.

It seems paradoxical in light of the sales discomfort still prevalent in financial services, but customer satisfaction improves more with sales culture than with service culture.  Helping people fully does seem to require a broad view of customer relationships that is heightened by sales priorities.  Virtually every sales initiative we undertake for our clients increases customer satisfaction as well as sales and earnings.

Bottom line, to really help your customers, you first have to sell your organization on sales culture.

Jim Schneider is President & CEO of Schneider Sales Management, Inc. and author of The Sales Producers, How the World’s Top Salespeople Sell.